Against The Cloud

First off, the word itself. The Cloud. What is The Cloud? It’s a server that you don’t own. You can’t touch it, it’s in someone else’s data center. It may or may not be virtual. Amazon’s Cloud or Microsoft’s or Google’s are several data centers with racks and racks of servers. They are physical, just not at your location. And they’re accessed across the Internet. This is something that we’ve been doing for 30 years, it’s called a Wide-Area Network, just scaled up bigger. We had bi-coastal WANs before the World Wide Web came along.

Four or five years ago, I was absolutely in agreement. Today, I’m 50/50, being near 100% for many types of servers (web servers, etc.) and closer to 25-30% for databases. My expectation is that those numbers will continue to shift upward as time goes on, but there will always be reasons not to migrate certain servers to someone else’s data center.

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